[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > The point is again, "obvious" is not so obvious sometimes.
You keep leaving out the context. We're writing *python*. What's obvious when you're writing python won't be when you're writing FORTRAN, or Scheme, or O'Caml, or Eiffel, or .... Generally (not always, I'll admit), when you're writing python, there's one obvious way to do something. If not, there's a good chance you're not writing python, you're writing something else with python syntax. > For most of the question I see asking here, they are from another > language background and their obvious way is what they are asking for > that they cannot find in python. Back in the dark ages, when computers had entire rooms, if not buildings, dedicated to them, I worked the support desk at a large state university. Most people learned FORTRAN as a first language, and then some of them went on to other languages. The standing observation was that "You can write FORTRAN in any language." This is because people would write FORTRAN constructs no matter what language they were using. If the language had a goto, they'd write: if not condition: goto after # if body after: If the language didn't have a goto, they'd write: if not condition: else: # if body And then they'd complain if the grader marked them down for doing this kind of thing. People coming from other languages trying to write the obvious way from that language in python are doing the exact same thing as the people who wrote the above fragments were doing: writing <fill in the blank> in python. It's not as obviously wrong because the languages are more recent than FORTRAN, but it's just as wrong. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list